The little extra that comes with Universal SSL

Last Monday we announced our SSL for Free plan users called Universal SSL. Universal SSL means that any site running on CloudFlare gets a free SSL certificate, and is automatically secured over HTTPS.

Using SSL for a web site helps make the site more secure, but there's another benefit: it can also make the site faster. That's because the SPDY protocol, created by Google to speed up the web, actually requires SSL and only web sites that support HTTPS can use SPDY.

CloudFlare has long supported SPDY, and kept up to date with improvements in the protocol. We currently support the most recent version of SPDY: 3.1.

CloudFlare's mission to bring the tools of the Internet giants to everyone is two fold: security and performance. As part of the Universal SSL launch, we also rolled out SPDY for everyone. Many of the web's largest sites use SPDY; now all sites that use CloudFlare are in the same league.

If your site is on CloudFlare, and you use a modern browser that supports SPDY, you'll find that the HTTPS version of your site is now served over SPDY. SPDY allows the browser to query for multiple objects in one request, and for the objects to be sent down the wire as they are ready to prevent hold-ups—that can be a big performance win.

Our goal is a faster, safer, more secure Internet. Universal SSL and SPDY for everyone are two big steps in that direction.